The Right Way to Submit Your Site.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 13-10-2009

0

Are you going to submit your site to the search engines the right way or the wrong way? To do it right, you need to know what youre doing, and your site needs to be optimized before you take it anywhere near a search engine.

How can you know if your site is ready? You consider these things before you submit. Have you included your keywords in your title tag, description, and content? Make sure youre tightly focused on only one or two keywords. You should also check for broken links, as these can cause big problems with search engines spiders.

Once youve submitted your site, you need to be prepared to wait. The chances that you won’t be added to any engine’s database for at least a month.

The Rules of Submission.

1. Theres no need to submit more than once. Despite the hype, you should never resubmit your site unless it gets dropped entirely. This doesnt apply to new pages, however. If you have created a few hundred pages in the last month or so and you dont think that they will be indexed quickly enough via links to them it is a good idea to submit them manually rather than waiting for your site to be indexed again. If you are using a Google Site map, simply adding them to this document will get them indexed pretty quickly.

2. Do it right the first time: be thorough when submitting, especially to directories. Take the time to research and find the most appropriate category for your site. If your site would fit into multiple categories find out what the policy is on multiple submissions. Some directories want you to submit to every relevant category, others want no more than one submission or they reject all submissions. Some want every page, others (most) want your index page and nothing more.

3. Be brief when you describe your site: get right to the point in two short sentences. Most directories will actually restrict the number of characters that you can use. If they dont it is still a good idea to try to wrap it up within twenty-five to thirty words. This is one of the largest differences between directory listings and search engine listings. In the directory you only get a short line to attract visitors; this is static for every visitor.

4. Be as accurate as you can. Dont try to trick people into visiting your site, as itll only backfire. Most directories are actually monitored by a team of editors. These editors will visit your link and red flag you if you are trying to deceive visitors or if you are trying to cheat in any other way. When it comes to directory listings, there are even less avenues for cheaters than there are in search engine listings as directories are checked out by hand.

5) Make sure that all your information is relevant, and try to make it appealing to humans as well as dense with keywords. Directories dont care about your key words very much. If your site isnt attractive to human beings it will be listed poorly. When human beings edit, human beings rank, and human beings get what they want.

6) Be patient: good things come to those who wait. Let the search engines take their time.

7) Dont submit any more than your homepage. The crawlers are quite capable of following your links and indexing your whole site from just your homepages URL.

If youre submitting you site to the DMOZ directory, follow these steps. If one doesnt work, wait a while and then do the next.

1. Submit your site.

2. Write a follow-up email to the categorys editor, explaining that youve been waiting and would like to know your sites status.

3. Email the next category editor up, in case theres a problem with your categorys editor.

4. Seek assistance at the Open Directory Projects public forum.

5. Email DMOZ senior staff seeking help. This is pretty much the last resort.

Submissions can be time consuming at first, but youll quickly get it down to a science. If you work hard on your SEO before you submit your site then you can get to the top more quickly than youd think.

SEO Tips for Yahoo.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 08-10-2009

0

With the improvements that have taken place at Yahoo over the last few months, the site is starting to become important again. Many say that their new search tool provides more relevant search results than Google does now great for Yahoo, since they were the top dog before Google came along.

Even for a few years after Googles conception, Yahoo! was the high and mighty search engine. It is still the popular choice for those who are seeking popular culture solutions and should be the target search engine for such pages. Yahoo! will put up a fight here for the king pin of search engines again before too long so make sure that you have quality results here as well as Google.

In general, Yahoo’s spiders work the same way as Google’s, following every link they find on the web and putting that information in a database. As always, you can also submit your site to the index manually. These manual submissions will speed up the process slightly but probably wont give you instantaneous results. There are no real ways to incorporate highly

Yahoo places some weight on your incoming links, but not as much as Google does its more interested in your content, which could explain why Yahoos results seem to be more relevant. To get a strong ranking at Yahoo, you should pay more attention to your keyword density than you do to your link popularity. Yahoo is also less likely to index a huge number of pages than other search engines are. Normally forums and posts are not touched by Yahoo as it will deem them unnecessary. There are times when this may seem like a good idea to many searchers, but there are also times when these types of results are missed. Basically, keep in mind that you will not get as many pages indexed by Yahoo! as you will by Google, MSN, and other search engines. You may, however, get a higher number of hits out of each page that you get listed in Yahoo! depending on the type of site that you provide.

At a Glance.

1. Use keyword-rich titles, about 20 words long and unique for each page of your site. These titles are the first things that Yahoo! sees and are the single most important aspect of your site regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for.

2. Use the meta description tag on each page too, with a description that fits your site well. Yahoo! still uses meta tags for its descriptive purposes but not necessarily word for word. Make sure that you have a quality description so that you dont run into situations where you dont get listed because of lack thereof. Basically, your description tag is an evasive action rather than an attempt at attaining a high number of hits or a higher rating.

3. A meta keywords tag should be included on every page of your website, and it should list words and phrases related to the site. Make sure that the key words describe the specific page rather than the site itself except for the index page. You dont want a bunch of people to be going to the wrong front page. They may see the page, not find their answer and leave. If they find your home page, theyll probably see that its a home page, look for a relevant link, and find the answer or material that they are looking for.

4. Well-written, keyword-rich content will help you a lot with Yahoo. Well-written content is important regardless of search engines. This content is the entire reason for your sites existence. Make sure that the content that you deliver is something that you want your name on. Something that you can stand behind.

5. Easy-to-follow internal links in plain text will help Yahoos spider the bottom of the page is a good place for them.

The key to getting a high ranking at Yahoo is to keep adding keyword-rich, relevant content to your website on a regular basis. Continual updates let Yahoos spiders know that you are maintaining the site and keeping your information updated theyll come back regularly to check out these changes.

Yahoos improvements are sure to help them in the market, and the number of users flocking to Yahoo is starting to show optimizers that there are more search engines out there than just Google.

SEO Elite Review: Check out SEO software ranking examples!

Filed Under (Free SEO) by admin on 22-09-2009

0

SEO Elite does what exactly?

SEO Elite starts from the following assumption:

- look at the page that ranks number 1 in Google,
- do exactly the same + a bit better,
- and you will be number 1

SEO Elite will examine “all” the SEO parameters that it finds out about the number 1 site in Google. Then this SE software will automate the process in mimicking this for your site.

SEO is more than a software-approach!

SEO is the art of ranking number 1 in any search engine for any keyword.

Spiders rank a website number one because they “think” that this site deserves to be number one. Of course the spider cannot think, and there needs to be a programmer who programs the spider to find out which site is best.

Now if you are smart enough to feed the spider exactly what the programmer thinks is important, you will have the knowledge to rank number 1.

This is exactly what SEO Elite does: it claims to know how to find out “all” the parameters that make a website ranking number 1.

Pitfalls of a software-approach to SEO

Suppose you find all the parameters needed to rank a website number 1. You manage to get all this parameters onto your site and you even manage to be rank number 1.

Now if your site is really deserving to be ranked number 1, all is fine. But if surfers start complaining that you are not, they will complain like: gosh, this Google these days just gives undeserving sites ranked at number 1.

It won’t take long since Google find out that “somebody broke the code” of the spiders, and they will update the spiders, hey, they want the search engine to give quality back to the visitors!

So that means that you need to get an upgrade of your SEO software approach… in other words: you are running after the facts in stead of above the facts.

How to be ranked number 1?

You rank number 1 because you deserve it. In general spider logic this still means:
- your page talks about the keyword you are optimizing for
- you page has lots of incoming links about the keyword you are optimizing for.

This is what SEO is about, and whatever you do different could make you not be number 1.

But my SEO software is really up to date, or is it not?

Your software can only be up to date AFTER the spiders’ software is updated. Unless you write the spiders yourself, you will always be a bit later.

You cannot know all the parameters the spider takes into account, unless again you are writing the spider software yourself.

And some of the parameters you cannot influence: age of the website is one of them. Suppose the spider needs to choose between 2 websites: the oldest one and the SEO mimic: which one to choose? The oldest one would be the easiest bet, and you cannot change the age of your website can you?

SEO Elite: a close look at this SEO software

SEO Elite advertisement says you can get a top 5 Google Ranking in under 30 Days… But the examples on the SEO Elite website tell a different story!

There are 16 websites listed at the bottom of the website with their rankings.

Examining those 16 websites :

- 6 are about Yahoo rankings (and the advertisement stated clearly Google ranking!)
- from the 10 Google rankings left, only 1 is stated to rank number 1 in Google BUT
- typing this so called number 1 website keywords in Google, the website ranks down only number 9!
- and the so called number 1 website keyword-phrase is far from a popular keyword-phrase, in other words:
not a lot of people search for that keyword AND
the website doesn’t rank number 1 for this keyword…

Why do you do SEO in the first place?

SEO is 1 of the ways to get more traffic to your website. But there is more in getting a lot of traffic to your site, than “blindly ranking 1 in Google”:

— Always make sure you rank number 1 for a word a lot of people are looking for! —

If you buy any SEO software or outsource your SEO to the SEO specialists: always check their SEO examples:
- are they ranking number 1
- are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords (bigger than 10.000 searches a month in the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing is considered not too low)
- how long did it take them to be number 1
- how big is the competition for the keyword-phrase (smaller or bigger than 5 million? As a general rule : above 5 million keyword-phrase results in Google, things become though)
- how big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase” (smaller or bigger than 33.000? As a general rule : above 33.000 quoted “keyword-phrase” results in Google, things become though)

If for all these items the SEO software or SEO specialist can answer YES, then you can start taking them very seriously!

Let us use SEO Elite as an example of how serious you should take this SEO software.

1. SEO Elite: Are they ranking number 1?

Yes they are for the keyword-phrase SEO Elite.

2. SEO Elite: Are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords?

According to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing, SEO elite has less than 2000 searches, so it’s not that bad, but again, it is under the 10.000.

The top keywords are :
46762 searches for seo
10815 searches for seo services
9849 searches for seo company,

and for none of these the SEO Elite website ranks number 1.

So “No” for popular search keywords.

3. How long did it take them to be number 1?

I cannot answer that question now.

4. How big is the competition for the keyword-phrase

SEO elite has about 1.5 million search results in Google, less than % million, so shouldn’t be to though to rank number 1 for. So that’s a “NO”.

5. How big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase”

The quoted keyphrase “Seo Elite” has about 250.000 search results, so the competition is stiff here and the SEO Elite website ranks number 1 here,
so that’s a “YES”.

6. SEO Elite results

2 YES and 2 NO… so for my analysis, it SEO Elite is a 50-50 program. It means it can do some good but is not proving it can do all. And the question is: do I really need to spend the money to reach not the highest goal: ranking number 1 for a popular key-wordphrase?

6. SEO Elite: the website

Whenever you are interested in something to buy on the Internet, check out the overall website of the product you want to buy! For SEO software

SEO Elite website is a 1 page website… Now what was the first idea to set up the Internet? To give people information, lots of information.

And we are talking about a “net” in Inter”net”: net means links here, there, everywhere… (that’s why links is so imprtant in SEO)

I didn’t see any of these and from the point of the “information-internet” I don’t like that: a SEO software program being on a website without loads of interesting content and without loads of links.

SEO software: read and check the examples before you buy!

Again this goes for all SEO software you want to buy on the Internet: if they say “I ranked this website for that
keyword number 1 in Google”, spend a few seconds to check it out!

1. SEO Elite: check out Google

SEO Elite’s first sentence talks about “your page in Google”

This sounds promising: is SEO Elite “the” SEO software to get me number 1 in “the” number 1 search engine
Google?

Well, at the bottom of the screen of the SEO Elite web page you then read:
Using SEO Elite I rank number 1 in Yahoo for this, that, and more site…

Oops, Yahoo! …

So do you want to be ranked number 1 in Yahoo, or do you want to be ranked number 1 in Google?
Everywhere I can hear you say… You want to be ranked number 1 in Google as that is at this moment the most
used search engine of all. If you get number 1 in Google, you surely will have a high ranking in Yahoo and MSN,
not the other way round!
So why starting the SEO Elite website with Google rankings and then switch to Yahoo?

But you mostly want to be ranked number 1 in Google because you have to pay for SEO Elite!

2. SEO Elite’s website examples

The SEO Elite website lists 16 example pages: high example-rankings using SEO Elite.

From those 16 , there are 6 Yahoo rankings, so that leaves us with 10 Google rankings.

Remember my SEO keywords rule above : SEO is well possible if your keyword phrase has less than 5 million results in Google.

How many of the example site in SEO Elites website are below this 5 million?
Only 2 out of 10.

And how many of those 10 rank 1 in Google?
Only 1 (or at least that is what they want you to believe!)

Hmmm. if I am going to pay big bucks for SEO Elite, then I want to be number 1. Don’t you?
Don’t you just hate it to be number 2?
I do, especially when I need to pay for it!

3. SEO Elite’s website examples : The numbers are wrong!

Numbers, numbers and numbers… Always check the numbers on any website!
So SEO Elite claims to have a number 1 ranking website :

* keyword phrase : learn to type faster
* website typingmaster.com.au

It takes only a few seconds to verify what SEO Elite says :
Type in Google - learn to type faster - and see what comes out:

55 million results! and not 5 million like mentioned on the SEO Elite website.
Great you say: SEO Elite is modest, he is able to rank number 1 with a higher competition than mentioned!

Does he???

Eh, you take a few seconds and a scroll down to find the example website ranking number 9!

Number 9!

Eh, yes you say: maybe the competition took over after the time the SEO Elite website was written…

Yes, but wasn’t the idea of SEO to rank number 1…. not for 1 day but “forever”.
Or was it just a typo like the 55 million that became 5 million, people do make mistakes you know…

Whatever the reason for the mistake: you need to check out all numbers quoted on the internet yourself!

All is a lot you say? I agree, but if the first example I chose already doesn’t fit the reality, then you don’t need to check all.

Anybody can make mistakes, but luckily we can easily check everything what is said about SEO, so always check
anything said about SEO before spending money on it!

Rank 9 is not that bad after all you say….

I agree, the first time your website gets on the first page of Google is one you keep remembering.

But:
I had to scroll down to find the SEO example page and only found it because I was looking for the particular URL
stated in SEO Elite’s example.
In other words, if you are ranked number 9, it takes some efforts of the visitor to actually scroll down and chose to click on number 9.

What is even more strange: The quoted keyword-phrase : “Learn to type faster” has no ranking on the first page!

Now this is what really bothers me: if I search in Google for the exact phrase “learn how to type faster” I would
assume that the SEO Example site would be number 1 there!

Back to Basics: what is the purpose of SEO?

Your purpose is getting as much people to your site as possible, isn’t it?

SEO software has the purpose of ranking 1 in Google.

Now it is very easy to rank 1 in Google for the keyword-phrase “jhdkghgkbdcds”,
but who is looking for jhdkghgkbdcds??? Nobody!

So if nobody looks for jhdkghgkbdcds, then why bother to rank number 1 with it?

Same with the above example-site with keyword phrase “learn to type faster”:

The Overture keyword-tool says that 448 people are typing in this keyword sentence in Yahoo.

448 people… is this a lot?
As mentioned above in this article: Nope,
and those 448 need to find the result example website at rank 9… not ideal SEO!

What is a nice number? Anything above 10.000 but: also know that above 10.000 “the big boys’ are competing
with you, below 1000 you kind of have the field for yourself. Ranking second for this example website could be expected after 2 months, but it should be number 1 in no time, even without using SEO software.

SEO Elite Conclusion

As I said before: always check the numbers and the facts about any SEO software! Also check the numbers in this SEO article written 13th May 2006.

Then make a decision yourself. If you see that the SEO software
- is ranking well for it’s own product
- is ranking websites for popular keyword well,

only then you can consider buying it.

Advanced Link Checks.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 12-09-2009

0

View the source of each and every page: is there JavaScript and CSS on the page? Remember that spiders may not index pages that have more than 10k or so of JavaScript or CSS embedded in them. Spiders dont enjoy getting tangled up in JavaScript. So as a general rule you should avoid putting out prompts and alerts using JavaScript every time that a page loads. Because of this rule, it is also wise to avoid link partners who do so on the pages that they link to you from. If anything looks fishy, it probably is.

CSS wont give you many problems. If you are going to use CSS, it is best to link to it from another source. Create a separate CSS page and use the tag to work it into the head of your HTML. This method will keep your file size down considerably, and since you will probably be using the same CSS on several pages, decrease your bandwidth usage. Normally a large quantity of CSS within the document isnt indicative of any suspicious behavior on the part of the linker. If you feel that you are, indeed, suffering from the fact that the site uses such an excessive proportion of CSS on the page itself, suggest to the webmaster that he/she may want to create an external CSS document and link to it in his/her header.

Check that you’re still on the domain you clicked on a link to, and you haven’t moved to another site or a subdomain. Some people will move you to another domain while telling thats their site and your link is there, relying on you not checking the address bar. This trick is all too common and happens to folks who are new to SEO every single day. This sad fact will continue until people begin to catch it every time.

If the domain has changed, delete your backlink to the site in question immediately and then email the webmaster with your complaint. If the webmaster does not fix the problem you may even want to request that they remove the link as the site may wind up discredited as a link farm or some such thing that you do not want to be associated with for fear of being banned from many popular search engines with technology used to combat link farms.

On a related subject, when you check your back links, make sure that these links appear in legitimate places. If the site is completely dedicated to linking to other sites and doesnt seem to be a directory or something similar you will want to get your link removed as soon as possible. There is no time when one link is worth the risk of being permanently banned from any popular search engine. Aside from the traffic that you will lose from that one search engine, you may wind up red flagged so to speak. It seems to be common practice among search engines that if one finds faulty activity the rest seem to find out soon afterwards.

Overall, if it seems dodgy, leave it alone. Its better to sacrifice one link in caution than to destroy your sites rankings by accepting one youre not sure of. There are hundreds of situations aside from link farms that can and will give you trouble. It would be impossible to list every scam as there are people who make their living (or seem to anyway) in creating and executing these scams. Whenever there is a new form of SEO technology that cant fail, you should watch out because it is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face. The only truly powerful and guaranteed method of SEO is to make your site valuable to your visitors and then let it fall where it may in the realm of the search engine.

It is difficult, after you have optimized your pages and submitted them to search engines and directories, to sit back and wait, but there is not much that can be done aside from attempting to accumulate links from good, solid places. The work that you have done is bound to pay off sooner or later as long as you stay honest. When it comes to the world of SEO, honesty is, indeed, the best policy.

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 11-09-2009

0

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so dont create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.